Goodbye, Gabriel, and
goodbye, Frank Langella. Before he goes, he fills Paige in on some general
details about who her parents are. “To us, they’re honestly heroes,” he says as
Elizabeth smiles proudly. “They’ve saved a lot of lives. Your parents have
sacrificed a lot for others.”
This does elide some of the
less heroic details about the Jenningses’ work, like dropping a car on a guy or
folding a woman’s corpse into a suitcase, but the omission is useful in bringing
Paige around to the Soviet side. (Another useful omission: pretending they
still believe the wheat crop is a nefarious American plot to starve the USSR.) I
was looking for a little more from that conversation, like more insight into
the past in Russia and how her parents were when they were young.
Sacrifice weighs heavily on
the characters in this episode. Paige’s breakup with Matthew (a relationship I
thought was kind of odd) may be her version of sacrifice. At first I read the
scene as Paige wanting to back away from spying on the Beemans but maybe the
opposite is true in that she wants to get deeper into her parents’ game but
doesn’t want him to be damaged. The teenager is certainly more unmoored than
normal, as the show shoots the scenes in the Jennings house from unfamiliar
angles, to the point where I wasn’t sure Paige was sitting in her own living
room at first.
I was amused that Elizabeth
reacted with a tinge of jealousy in Mississippi when she found out that hippie
was cheating on her. I don’t think she’s personally jealous exactly but it
seemed like more of a professional “But I
do the betraying” reaction.
It looks like Stan will
keep his counterintelligence assignment, at least until the mission with Sofia
runs its course. She appears to work for TASS, the Russian news agency. Stan’s
heavily redacted description of his workday to Renee was funny. She didn’t get
much out of the conversation but she’s apparently not a spy, as least as far as
Gabriel knows.
“It adds up,” Gabriel says
of his work in America. He did terrible things at the camps, sometimes to
people who didn’t deserve them, and as he talks, the mask falls away. He didn’t
so much do it for ideology but because he was scared, like a lot of other
people. Almost in real time, his resolve and rationalization fall away.
Gabriel’s parting words to
Philip: “You were right about Paige. She should be kept out of all this.” This
is a stunning, cruel thing to say to Philip after all he’s gone through with
his daughter, especially to upend Philip’s world and then walk out the door.
Was all that for nothing? Will they all end up exhausted and haunted like
Gabriel? After the door closed, Philip should have said, “THANX. This information
might have come in handier TWO SEASONS AGO.”
It is sad that Gabriel is
gone but the bright side is we get more of Claudia.
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